10 Cheap Apps For Autistic Kids

When my daughter was diagnosed with a severe form of autism over 11 years ago, my husband and I immediately got to work on finding out different tools, devices, games, and programs that would help her. In many cases, her unique ‘brand’ of autism meant we had to adapt the available tools to her specific needs.

And that’s where this post comes in. Not only is there so much out there for autistic kids–and most of it assuming that all autistic kids are alike–we ran into another major problem: money. It’s not just that we couldn’t afford this stuff, it’s that nobody can afford it. There are seriously apps the cost over $300, mostly for the fact that they know you’ll pay it if it will help your child.

Instead, here’s a list of more economical apps, and many of them have lite editions that let you see how helpful they are before you invest in the real deal.

Dragon Naturally Speaking

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We first bought the desktop software for our daughter years ago, and this speech to text software (the kind high-powered business executives would use to write an email because they're too busy to sit down to do it at a computer) was amazing. Basically, our daughter would speak a list of words into the microphone and then the text would appear on the screen. The amazing part was what she would see...if she didn't focus on using the words correctly, the wrong words would appear! NOTE: this one worked well for us because our daughter reads very well, she just doesn't communicate verbally that well.